Ms Ellen Brennan:

I thank members for their invitation to speak to the committee. They can probably tell from my accent that I am not from Mayo. I am from the Dublin south city partnership. I will not go over the same stuff Ms Macdonald spoke about, but I will outline what the Tús programme is, what Tús supervisors and co-ordinators do, how the roles have changed, and the impact on the community.

Tús was launched in 2010. It is a community employment activation scheme that provides short-term working opportunities for unemployed people. It is managed by 49 local development companies nationally for the Department of Social Protection, which has overall responsibility for the scheme.

To be eligible for the programme, candidates must have been on a jobseeker's payment for at least 12 months and be in receipt of jobseeker's allowance. They are referred from the social welfare offices or can self-refer. Up to 30% are allowed to self-refer. As with the RSS, Tús participants work 19.5 hours a week for 12 months. That is a difference between the schemes. There is a limit of a year with Tús, so we have quite a high turnover with that scheme.

Tús plays a key role in social inclusion in rural and urban settings. We support day centres for the elderly, childcare centres, sports centres, community halls, disability services, environmental groups, heritage services and social enterprises. We have roughly one to three participants in each community group. To give the example of Dublin South City Partnership, DSCP, which I work with, we have an allocation of 160 placements. We work with 80 local community organisations so we have a really wide reach. That means we are able to provide specific opportunities to the candidates. We are also able to respond quickly to changing needs in the community. We run directly projects such as care and repair. That is a free gardening and handyman service for the over-65s. We have about 300 regular clients. We fit safety rails and smoke alarms, set mousetraps and intervene in cases of hoarding, that is, do clear-outs. These older people do not really have anyone else to help them. They fall between the cracks. The model is working in supporting all these local community needs. The only thing that slows us down a bit is getting the referrals from the Department of Social Protection. We are ready and well placed to take more people; we just need candidates. Our placements are key in developing our clients' career progression. Approximately 30% of participants go on to full-time employment and another 30% go on to further training or schemes, but many of the remaining participants would benefit from one more year on Tús to become job-ready.

Now I will talk a little about our roles as supervisors and co-ordinators. We are responsible for supervising up to 25 participants each, following a recent increase in our quota. We must recruit the candidates and find the placements for them. We look after all the HR and administrative stuff, that is, payroll, Garda vetting, HR records and reporting to Pobal and the Department of Social Protection. On top of that, now that a lot of the service has gone online, we find ourselves helping clients to set up bank accounts, phone plans and Revenue accounts and to fill in social welfare applications. We are like a one-stop shop for providing all that information and support to remove any barriers to employment, so the role has evolved a lot.

Not many people know about what the co-ordinating supervisors do. Not only do we have all the same duties as the supervisors, that is, we look after 25 participants each and do all the HR stuff, but we also line-manage a team of supervisors. We are sometimes office managers because we have satellite offices apart from the partnership head offices. We look after data protection, budgets and strategic planning. It is essentially a programme management role. For that we get a top-up of only €5,000 a year. Essentially, the model is working well the way it was set up, but the resources are a bit stretched. There are a few things that need to be looked at in that regard. Furthermore, our terms and conditions are totally different from those of the other partnership staff. We work alongside other community programmes such as the social inclusion and community activation programme, SICAP, and the ability programme. I went on maternity leave two years ago, as did two of my colleagues at the same time. They were paid; I was not. I had to go on State maternity pay. It was quite unfair and a bit of a kick in the face. We do the job, however, because we love it and believe in the programme. There are just a few things that need to be looked at to make it more sustainable and more attractive and to retain the supervisors who know the field well.